A diary of my creative experiences.

10/08/2013

From September 30 - October 5, I participated in a workshop with Glenys Mann. The title of the workshop was "Fragile Objects...Earth Coverings Fibre as Metaphor". A fascinating title. The workshop covered natural dyeing and stitch. We also dyed with liquid rust dye...three tubs with teas bag, caustic soda and iron sulphate. These are my dyeing efforts using eucalyptus leaves.

Old wool blanket dyed in Cinerea with bottle tops, weeds and leaves.

This was rolled on the outside of the wool (above) and dyed in the cinerea.

Close up of bottle top and leaf impressions

The Cinerea (Silver Dollar or Argyle Apple) was giving a lovely reddish orange colour but changed to brown as the dye bath was used.

Organza

Silk Satin

Each day we were given a project, the first day was "Messages and Secrets", very thought provoking. I chose to create my piece around isolation and this is were I used the liquid rust dye on seed silk. I also used shibori spiderwebs and mokume. I did 10 panels, but only photographed a couple as examples.

Shibori spider web

Sorry about the blur. This is the main panel for the theme "Isolation" the mokume line in the other panels runs in a similar way but just at different heights in the bottom third of the panels.

This next piece is wool dipped in the liquid rust.

Another rust bath using the seed silk.

Rust dyed seed silk

Our next project was "Memory Keepers" with the direction to stitch as we were first taught. I did three pieces, old wool, new wool and silk and these were then dyed in the cinerea but late in the afternoon so the dye bath was brown. The new wool (very suspect content) did not take up the dye.

Wool/new wool/silk

Project three was to create a 3 meter scroll from either fabric or paper. I had brown paper that I had painted and texturized, so I tore this into long strips and rust dyed. On the blank sections I wrote letters (husband to wife) and in the style of pioneer/depression era with the husband leaving the wife on the farm while he went looking for work. Project four was to "Mend" here we had to mend two pieces of fabric and then join. I used old woollen blanket pieces and tore holes cut slits and patched. The following shows the scroll and mended piece on display.

One fun mini project we did was to make a small book, I used my rust dyed papers, really enjoyed this project as we were given 16 pages from a book (Gambols in Gastronomy) and we had to cut out words or sentences to make some fun verses.

Work by other participants on display

This was a workshop from which I went home with inspiration and new techniques, many thanks to Glenys and also to my workshop friends who were willing to share their knowledge. Recipe for rust dye bath: Container 1 = 50 strong tea bags in 2 litres of boiling water Container 2 = add 1 litre of cold water then 1 tblsp of caustic soda then another litre of water Container 3 = 2 cups of water with 2 tbsp of iron sulphate and litre of water Dip from container to container or vary the order of dipping, when using silk when dipping in the caustic soda dip quickly and squeeze (the caustic soda) will rot the silk straight away so just a quick dip. When I used fabric I scrunched the fabric in a ball and squeezed the liquid through it. PS we also shellacked our papers.